Sunday, January 20, 2008

Tonight, while taking a long drive with a friend of mine, I asked him to give me and idea for something to blog about. Initially he said "Treo vs. Palm", and then decided against it since it's been written about many times. Maybe I'll have my own say on that in a future column. He then thought of a "Vista Sucks" column, but that too has been blogged about many times. But while he was saying that, I realized that I actually like Vista, and that has NOT been blogged about too often. After all, who likes Vista? So here is my blog post, dedicated to Why I Like Vista.

To be brutally honest, I initially liked Vista because I was one of the first to have it when it was still in Beta. That sort of forced me to like it. When everyone saw it on my computer and ooh'd and ahh'd at the beautiful OS, I HAD to tell them it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But after a while Vista started to piss me off. File copying was excruciatingly slow, and to create a new folder in the Program Files directory took 4 UAC prompts. But I got used to it, and now with Vista SP1, many issues have been fixed, including the 2 annoyances mentioned above.

I think the main reason people dislike Vista, is because when it first came out there were many hardware devices and software that were not compatible with the new OS. This caused everyone to say "why should I upgrade if nothing is compatible?". But that's not true anymore. Everything (or at least almost everything) including software and hardware, are now fully compatible. People were also complaining about the UAC prompts; to that I say, just turn it off! Most importantly, Microsoft screwed up with Windows XP. Why? Because it was a really good and stable operating system, and people had no need to switch.

But if you take a deep look at Vista, especially now that SP1 is out, it really is much cooler and more stable, and at the very least, the same as XP. It's definitely nicer. It's definitely more user friendly (the search box in the start menu is awesome, if only poeple actually knew what it could be used for). And, the kicker is that if poeple would leave UAC on, I would get a lot less tech support calls.

There is one thing that makes me wish I was still using XP, and that is the way MS redesigned the networking on Vista. It's an IT nightmare. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this, please, I beg of you, bring back the old Windows XP network apps that allow us to see our IP address in 1 double-click instead of 4. And allow us to have separate icons in the tray for the different networks we may be connecting to. Believe it or not, I actually want to know if I'm connected wirelessly, or hard-wired, and I want to know when my computer is aquiring an IP address. Thank you.Bottom line people, stop complaining. I'm not saying you should spend money and upgrade, but if you buy a new computer, just get Vista. In a few years from now you'll thank me.